The Google/Digg acquisition negotiations were in full swing as of last Tuesday, had passed the term sheet stage and the two companies were in final negotiations in the $200 million range. But sometime this last week Google decided to walk from the deal. Digg was notified on late Thursday or Friday.

Google was in the due diligence stage of the deal, where they peer deep into Digg’s technology and financial statements. Most term sheets are non binding, so anything that gives the buyer pause can be used as an excuse to walk away - but generally the buyer already has a very good idea what they are getting well before the term sheet stage.

Two sources close to the companies suggested that some issue that came up during technical due diligence was to blame. One source said that the issue was more personality driven, and that Google decided after spending more time with Digg’s top team that there just wasn’t a fit.

Either way the deal appears to dead and can be added to the long list of failed Digg acquisition deals. And when a company is “left at the altar” other buyers are usually hesitant to step in.

So what will Digg do now? We’re hearing they’ll just push through with a new round of financing. Digg hired Allen & Co. to represent them in the sale, but the investment bank is just as good at closing massive venture financings, too (they represented both Slide and Ning in their recent a half billion dollar valuation financings).

TechCrunch is a content partner of ShoeMoney.com.

Barry Schwartz is one of the most respected journalists in the SEO industry and when he wrote this article called The Sadness In The Industry the other day I was a bit surprised.

When I wrote Why I dont Like 95% Of The SEO industry it seemed to upset a lot of people who thought it was a blanket statement about SEO. It was not at all. It was a statement about the PEOPLE in the industry. Pretty much every established SEO who has been around a bit that I know agreed with the post or atleast thought the points had some validity.

I had Danny Sullivan (the godfather of SEO) on my webmaster radio show and I felt it was a very good show. From the beginning it was pretty clear that we agreed knowing SEO obviously is a very powerful skill but the industry needs to be held to some standards. There was a lot more to the discussion but that is the just of it. After the show there was a huge backlash against Danny for not coming at me with guns blazing… I think that even opened Danny’s eyes a little more at what I was talking about in regards to all these people who call themselves SEO’s.

So the current state of SEO is no surprise to me. While I am not a professional SEO (I have never been paid to do SEO) we attend many internet marketing conferences and have become very good friends with the most accomplished SEO’s walking the planet.

You pretty much have 2 groups of “old school” SEO’s:

Those who have celebrity status for what they have written about - These people have become venomous… They hate the fact that new people have come along with their blogs and made them irrelevant. They are super jealous of anyone who is recognized more then they are. The occasionally make forum posts or blog posts outing other SEO’s tactics so that people remember they still exist.

Those who have celebrity status for what they have accomplished These guys have distanced themselves from the industry. They used to blog, be apart of forums, have radio shows but they have slowed way down. They never really cared about the spotlight in the first place and now that there is all this venom in the industry they would rather rack up contracts with companies for actually *DOING* SEO then writing or talking about it.

Honestly I think the SEO profession is a victim of its own success.

I love SEO… I love the way it works. I love optimizing sites for search engines. SEO is a important part of internet marketing. I still believe SEO will become less important as time goes on but that does not mean I do not respect the skill ATM.

I feel very insulted when I am labeled a SEO and have for a long time. Are you proud to labeled a SEO?

SearchEngineCollege.com is an online SEO course website. It doesn’t look like its nationally accredited, but hey, you get the SearchEngineCollege.com stamp of approval once the courses are completed.

Thanks for the shirt guys.

If you would like to see your website or company featured on Free Shirt Friday click here

New site called 12 Seconds just started and my friend Big Dave sent me a invite to the beta. I might have a bunch of beta invites soon… I will keep you posted.

The service is pretty simple… record 12 seconds of video. Its like the twitter of video. Its pretty sweet but a little intimidating!

Google Launched Knol Yesterday… or what people are calling a “wikipedia killer”. Lots of people are trashing it but I gotta say I am pretty impressed. It has every component for success.

Here are some of my favorite things from the few hours I have been using it.

So I have a SEO CHALLENGE. Who’s SEO article on knol will rank the highest in Google? Will be interesting to see.

If you search for “lost followers” on twitter search right now you will see loads and loads of people crying about losing followers.

I got 3 emails from people this morning who said my follower count had dropped to 3900. I was like wtf last time I saw it, it was like 2500 ?!?. People are nuts about this Twitter stuff!

Twitter has confirmed there are some issues but its more related to losing people you follow. You can read the official update here

I talked to a developer there this morning via email and he said people should be ready for their follower count NOT to increase because they do not remove the spammers from the count when they ban them. The update yesterday was the first time they had tried removing the spammers from follower counts.

It will be interesting to see how it washes out.

Sometimes I do stupid things… no really! For instance last May it seemed people were just completely obsessed with my feedburner count on subscribers. If it went down I got emails asking what happen if it went up I got emails congratulating me. Pretty weird.

So one day I decided just to remove it. Then I started getting emails that there was no possible way for people to sign up for my feed… I thought to myself, “whatever, people can figure it out if they really want to” (which is the lazy way out).

So yesterday I was looking at my Feedburner stats and pretty surprised to see they look to have completely plateaued at around 16,500 readers since I took the little counter off.

Meanwhile my online arch nemesis John Chow skyrockets up to 27,000+ readers.

Sure I could use a lot of excuses… but people can always come up with excuses why they fail.

So yesterday I pinged unique blog designs to make my RSS button clickable and now hopefully the trend will go back up!

This article was originally published on techcrunch and is being re-published here with permission.

Google’s on and off negotiations with Digg have been back on in a big way for the last six weeks, we’ve heard from multiple sources inside of Google, and the two companies are close to a deal that will bring Digg under the Google News property. The acquisition price is in the $200 million range, says one source.

We first wrote about the Google-Digg negotiations in March. Despite a vigorous denial by Digg CEO Jay Adelson the negotiations continued, although Google’s Marissa Mayer reportedly cooled on the company for a period of time.

The companies are now in final negotiations according to our sources, although it could be a couple of weeks before it closes. And while the major deal points have been agreed on, the acquisition could still fall apart. Microsoft, which was previously interested in the company, may be willing to step back in at a much lower price.

Most of Digg’s revenue comes from a three year ad deal with Microsoft, which will be terminated on a sale to Google. Digg has raised $11.3 million in venture capital.

Meanwhile, Google’s fascination with the Digg voting concept continues.

There was a post on the digital point forums from a newbie (1 post wonder) poster saying he had just purchased a list containing all attendees of the Affiliate Summit.   The user also posted a link to a CSV file which was distributed to exhibitors of the event.  The post was reported to the moderators/admins of Digital Point and being I am one I checked it out.  I followed the link and downloaded the list… it contained names and home addresses of attendees of ASW 2007…

My home address was listed as was many other affiliates.  Being a moderator I deleted the link.

Shawn Collins tried to use the ole “but everyone is doing it” defense in that thread:

As is standard with any conference, Affiliate Summit makes the snail mail addresses available to exhibitors at each conference.

I was pretty surprised at this.  I was not familiar with this “conference standard” of giving out all attendees mailing addresses to Sponsors and Exhibitors.

Later Shawn commented in the thread (which i merged with the first):

Also, during the registration process for Affiliate Summit, there is an option to opt-out of having the snail mail address shared with exhibitors.

The CSV that I downloaded from that link there are 1586 (I think only 1500 attendees at that event back then so that’s weird.. ) names on the list with attendees personal information.  I guess those people missed that part or did not care about their info being distributed.

I have been to pretty much every conference in the industry (I think) and I had never heard of these lists of attendees being sold (or included with price of sponsorship/exhibitor however you want to say it).

So I reached out to the head of basically every conference I have ever been to…. pointed them to that thread and asked them their conferences policy on distributing conference goers private information.

Danny Sullivan (SMX Conferences):

Hey no we don’t do this.  We do not share attendees personal data.

Kevin M. Ryan  (Vice President, Search Engine Strategies Conference):

Our policy is that we do not sell, rent, barter or otherwise release delegate information.

Brett Tabke (Webmasterworld PubCon Conferences):

We have never given out so much as one name, email, or postal address to any
one. We have no plans to do so in the future.

Rick Calvert (BlogWorld & New Media Expo) :

Exhibitors are allowed to collect attendee data at the show either by
collecting business cards, or using what we call a “lead retrieval unit”
(the little machines exhibitors use to scan your badge). Again this is only
done with the attendees consent.

To be fair to Shawn I am sure this is all perfectly legal and somewhere in his terms of service he has spelled out that he has the right to sell your info  (or to give it to paying sponsors/exhibitors).

I guess I will look for the “opt out” box from now on.

Maybe you guys are wiser then me and opted out from having your info sold ?

Batman is very loudly destroying just about every financial record any movie has ever set.. but why?

Bruce Wayne is a pimp and a true capitalist.  He is a Billionaire industrialist who has decided to take his wealth and power and save humanity.

I think that is truly the American Dream.

Most people just think its about making money… I think its about making it then doing something with it that has an impact.

Creating wealth is easy… making a difference in the world is not.